Christine Corcoran, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1989, cannot walk or drive. She has relied on her husband to mail or turn in absentee ballots on her behalf.
But this year, she was forced to sit out April’s local elections in her Milwaukee suburb after the state Supreme Court temporarily barred voters from giving their completed ballots to someone else to deliver.
“I’m disappointed,” Corcoran, 67, told Fredreka recently. “I do not want my right taken away from me.”
Disability rights advocates around the country say voters like Corcoran are confronting additional and unnecessary barriers to voting in this year’s midterm elections as conservative lawmakers and litigants pursue new voting restrictions in the name of preventing voter fraud.
Voting experts say fraud is exceedingly rare, but “election integrity” has become the rallying cry among some Republican lawmakers, spurred on by false claims from former President Donald Trump that the 2020 election was illegitimate.
In Georgia, for instance, lawmakers have sharply reduced the availability of ballot drop boxes in heavily populated areas. Florida legislators, meanwhile, have made it a felony to pick up and submit more than two vote-by-mail ballots.
And, in Wisconsin, conservative interests have gone to court to argue that voting practices employed in the 2020 election -- such as allowing another person to hand in a voter’s absentee ballot or submitting ballots via drop box -- violate state law.
The efforts target what critics call “ballot harvesting,” which they say invites fraud by allowing multiple ballots to be collected and dropped off by unauthorized people. Disability rights advocates argue, however, that restricting voting options threatens to marginalize a swath of Americans ahead of crucial midterm elections, in which control of Congress and governorships hangs in the balance.
“A coordinated effort is happening in multiple states to make voting harder for everyone, but, in particular, it’s making the process inaccessible for people with disabilities,” said Shira Wakschlag, senior director of legal advocacy and general counsel at The Arc.
The Arc advocates on behalf of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and has joined coalitions of civil and voting rights groups in Texas and Georgia in attempting to strike down parts of new voting laws in those states.
About one in four American adults live with some type of disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And researchers at the Program for Disability Research at Rutgers University estimate that 38 million disabled Americans were eligible to vote in 2020.
A record 61.8% of disabled voters cast ballots in the general election that year, according to the Rutgers researchers – up from 55.9% four years earlier as state and local election officials opened up new voting avenues during the pandemic.
